Karl L. E. Nickel (1924 - 2009)

Professor Dr. Karl Nickel, one of the founding fathers of interval computations in Germany, died on January 1, 2009, a couple of weeks before his 85th birthday. Karl Nickel, professor emeritus of mathematics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany, was born in 1924 in Tübingen. As with most young people of his age, he had to fight in the war. After being released as a prisonerof-war, he enrolled at the famous Göttingen University. Following study at Göttingen and Tübingen, he received his Diploma in Mathematics (equivalent to a Master’s Degree) in 1948. He worked at the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart and earned the degree of Doctor in Mathematics (equivalent to a PhD) in 1949. He was employed in aircraft design in Cordoba, Argentina, between 1951–55 and worked at the Universities of Brunswick and Karlsruhe between 1955–62. As early as 1958 he gave a course in a programming language, a novelty at that time; cf. [18]. He joined the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Karlsruhe as a full professor for numerical mathematics and mainframe computing in 1962 and served there for several years as director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics. There he was the first director both of the Institute of Practical Mathematics and of the Institute for Computer Science, which he founded. Through these activities he played a prominent role in the rise of computer science and in the establishment of education in this subject at Karlsruhe. In 1976 he moved to the University of Freiburg, where he served